one afternoon

I've reached the age of tumbling afternoons.
They jostle and jump on one another so fast
that it's becoming very hard to tell them apart.

How stuck in time, indelible that one afternoon!

The closed casket drenched in light
falling through the sanctuary window
and suffusing me in fatalsitic radiance.

This afternoon is suspended in amber.
I am inside this difference of daylight.
I am beyond nature and nostalgia.
I have fallen into a numinous well.
But it is not dark. There is such light
as to turn the eyes a color of sighing.
Few tears are wrung through irises,
but irises bloom to a vision of being.
A diiferent form of seeing, lingering --
how a ghost dreams in glowing space.

If I thought time at this moment was real,
I would say it feels like old music or 1957.

I drift on the amber light toward you,
where you surround me with a knowing
and with a familiar pillowing extravagance
that cushions my ache of natural bones.

But this strange place hurts with meaning.
Here, no breaths bring a flow of language.
Here, the light of you collapses into itself,
and I stretch out a hand to touch this air.

This one afternoon cradles me in the wild
and there is no way to properly describe it.
I can only allude to a deep flowering vortex.

Other afternoons will tumble and accumulate.
But I have sunk roots of eyes into this one,
a time as ludicrous as the soil of a heaven.